At one point, they actually ran an incredibly incendiary video
showing one of the two men in question ranting at length about how much
he hates white people. Mind you, to most folks in mainstream media, this
is normally considered an irresponsible sort of clip to run because it
is needlessly incendiary and racially divisive and, moreover, gives
these otherwise fringe figures far more attention than they deserve --
not to mention that some of the people who absorb these rants will be
persuaded by them.

But when it helps underscore the long-running Fox theme that Obama is
a black radical racist who secretly hates white people, they'll run
anything, apparently.

Now, it's worth understanding something that only Trace Gallagher
briefly mentions here: The New Black Panther Party has long been
recognized as a real anti-white hate group, both by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center. (Read these reports in full to understand just how ugly and vicious they are.)

And indeed, Glenn Beck later in the afternoon compared the NBPP
characters hanging outside a voting station to the Ku Klux Klan -- a
fair comparison, but one that is more revealing than Beck thinks.

Because while the Klan of the Civil Rights era indeed indulged in
voter intimidation tactics -- one of the main reasons the DOJ's
voter-rights section exists in the first place, in fact -- it did so on a
massive, and horrifically violent, scale. From Wikipedia:

In states such as Alabama and Mississippi, Klan members
forged alliances with governors' administrations. In Birmingham and
elsewhere, the KKK groups bombed the houses of civil rights activists.
In some cases they used physical violence, intimidation and
assassination directly against individuals. Many murders went unreported
and were not prosecuted by local and state authorities. Continuing
disfranchisement of blacks across the South meant that most could not
serve on juries, which were all white.

The site goes on to detail some of the notorious murders committed by
the Klan in their campaign of terror against black voting rights,
including Medgar Evers and Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman.

Meanwhile, what have the New Black Panther actually done? Sent a
couple of shady-looking dudes to stand outside a mostly black precinct
and where no one reported that they were intimidated by their presence.
That's it.

Warden is especially noteworthy because, just like those New Black
Panthers, Roy Warden was in fact the subject of a DOJ voter-intimidation
investigation -- and they indeed decided not to prosecute him based on a
lack of evidence, just as in the NBPP case. Media Matters has more:

In his May 14 testimony before the U.S. Commission on
Civil Rights, Thomas Perez, assistant attorney general for the DOJ's
civil rights division, highlighted a case that completely undermines the
notion that the DOJ's decisions in the Black Panthers case were
unprecedented or racially motivated. Perez testified
that in 2006, the DOJ "declined to bring any action for alleged voter
intimidation" "when three well-known anti-immigrant advocates affiliated
with the Minutemen, one of whom was carrying a gun, allegedly
intimidated Latino voters at a polling place by approaching several
persons, filming them, and advocating and printing voting materials in
Spanish." [U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 5/14/10]
Anti-immigrant activist in 2006 case reportedly had "9mm Glock strapped to his side" at polling place.
A November 8, 2006, Austin American-Statesman article reported (from
the Nexis database): "In Arizona, Roy Warden, an anti-immigration
activist with the Minutemen, and a handful of supporters staked out a
Tucson precinct and questioned Hispanic voters at the polls to determine
whether they spoke English." The article continued:

Armed with a 9mm Glock automatic strapped to his side,
Warden said he planned to photograph Hispanic voters entering polls in
an effort to identify illegal immigrants and felons.

A crew of anti-immigrant activists, meanwhile, visited
several South Side polling places in what one poll-watch group called a
blatant attempt to intimidate Hispanic voters.

Anti-immigrant crusader Russ Dove circulated an English-only
petition, while a cameraman filmed the voters he approached and Roy
Warden stood by with a firearm in a holster.

Diego Bernal, a staff attorney with the Mexican American Legal
Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), said the trio was trying to
intimidate Hispanic voters. "A gun, a camera, a clipboard before you
even get to the polls - if that's not voter intimidation, what is?" he
asked.

Bernal said his group encountered the men at the Precinct 49
polling place at South 12th Avenue and West Michigan Street and began
documenting the scene with their cameras. "There was an interesting
period where they were taking pictures of us taking pictures of them."

Tucson Citizen: Incident "reported to the FBI." A November
8, 2006, Tucson Citizen article (from Nexis) reported that Mexican
American Legal Defense Fund lawyer Diego Bernal "said he reported the
incident to the FBI." The article also reported that Pima County
elections director Brad Nelson said: "If intimidation or coercion was
going on out there, even though it might have been outside the 75-foot
limit, it's something we take very seriously, and we'll be looking into
it."

We've rounded out the video with a selection of rantings from
Minutemen, Joe Arpaio fans, and the pack of Arizona neo-Nazis led by
J.T. Ready. All of these people, it should be understood, have longstanding associations with Russell Pearce and Joe Arpaio -- two of Fox's favorite spokesmen for the nativist, pro-SB1070 contingent.

Sara Robinson has worked as an editor or columnist for several national magazines, on beats as varied as sports, travel, and the Olympics; and has contributed to over 80 computer games for EA, Lucasfilm, Disney, and many other companies. A native of California's High Sierra, she spent 20 years in Silicon Valley before moving to Vancouver, BC in 2004. She currently is pursuing an MS in Futures Studies at the University of Houston. You can reach her at srobinson@enginesofmischief.com.